A Nurses’ Union Flexed Its Power. One Hospital Is Pushing Back.

Some nurses who worked during Covid’s deadly first wave in March 2020 describe it as a terrifying but also galvanizing experience. Together they confronted mass death and an unknown pathogen, sometimes donning garbage bags when the protective gear ran out.

One result was an invigorated nurses’ union, which has won a series of victories for its members at hospitals across the New York City region over the past several years. Today nurses have better wages and improved working conditions. They even receive cash payouts when hospitals leave units understaffed, a benefit they won by striking last year.

But the city’s largest private hospital system is taking aim at some of those changes. It started in 2023, right after nurses at Columbia University Medical Center, the largest hospital in the NewYork-Presbyterian system, reached an agreement on a contract that included pay raises and improved workplace conditions. Just weeks later, Columbia nearly doubled what some retired nurses paid for health insurance, according to the nurses’ union. The union managed to have the new insurance rate voided through arbitration, but it has said it believes the price increase was payback for the contract.

This summer, NewYork-Presbyterian turned to the federal courts to try to reclaim some of the workplace power it lost to the nurses’ union in recent years.

Three weeks ago it filed a petition in Federal District Court in Manhattan, asking a judge to overturn an arbitration decision that awarded nurses in an understaffed unit at Columbia University Medical Center more than $270,000. The hospital said that it had made “good-faith efforts” to hire enough employees and that the nurses should receive nothing.

But the clearest sign of an “escalation” occurred in June, said Pat Kane, the executive director of the state’s largest nurses’ union, the New York State Nurses Association. That was when NewYork-Presbyterian took an unexpected step in its long-running battle to fire a particular nurse and union organizer at a Westchester County hospital. Having lost before three tribunals, the hospital system filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.